By David Halberstam
Published November 07, 1999
I thought that with the end of the century approaching, it might be a good time to take stock of where this profession is. Obviously, it should be a brilliant moment in American journalism, a time of a genuine flowering of a journalistic culture: The country is more affluent than ever before, and much of that affluence grows out of what is called the world of communications, indeed what are now called communications stocks are the hottest stocks on the market; our population is better educated than ever before; America's role in the world is more complicated and challenging than ever -- the end of the Cold War means we must look at the world as it really is, not just through the lens of a bipolar division, capitalism good, communism bad; and the technology with which to report on that world is ever more brilliant -- our colleagues can broadcast instantaneously from any part of the globe.
But the reverse is true. Those to whom the most is given, the executives of our three networks, have steadily moved away from their greatest responsibilities, which is using their news departments to tell the American people complicated truths, not only about their own country, but about the world around us.
They have met with their pollsters and have decided that the rest of the world is a boring place. So all three networks have become essentially isolationist.
ABC is cutting back dramatically on what used to be called journalism, and particularly on foreign reporting. Jim Laurie, one of its tiny handful of remaining great foreign correspondents, a talented man who had covered almost every major story overseas for two decades, from Tiananmen Square to the end of communism, was recently told that it might be a good idea to look elsewhere for work because the network was not really interested in his part of the world, which includes, among others, some 1 billion Chinese, or for that matter, his kind of reporting.
Comparably, ABC -- and ABC, with the decline of CBS, has been for the last decade or so our best network in terms of news -- has had a great deal of difficulty in finding a resident correspondent for Moscow.
Now, Moscow right now should be a great story. Here is a superpower, our arch rival for 40 years, imploding, with memories all too powerful of what happens when a proud and powerful nation with its own belief in its greatness unravels and embryonic democracy begins to fail -- memories of Germany between the wars.
And no young reporter working for ABC wants to cover it. The reason no one wants to cover it is because if you're assigned there you get a dangerous and difficult story, but you don't get on the evening news. Foreign reporting is not the way to get ahead within the networks.
The way to get ahead for a young reporter is to be cosmetically attractive or artificially provocative -- a shouter with a shtick -- or both, stay close to Washington, and get on the air a great deal, and in time get on a magazine show doing trivial reporting about trivial subjects.
That is in complete contrast to the values of the media world -- the broadcast media world which existed when I entered the profession in the mid-'50s and which existed well through the '60s and '70s.
In that era, the dominating figures in broadcasting had all come to prominence by dint of covering the toughest story in the world, a foreign story, by the way, World War II, and the reporters who came of age in my generation covered our equivalent, the Vietnam War.
The members of the older generation had proved themselves in the field, a sense of internationalism was in their bones, and they would have been repelled by much of what passes for reporting by today's signature figures on the different magazines.
They were men like Ed Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, David Schoenbrun, Charles Collingwood, Richard C. Hottelet. Those values, which they helped define, existed well into the '70s when it was mandatory before you were promoted to senior journalistic status -- to becoming an anchor, for example -- to have gone overseas and covered at least one major story. That was how you made your bones in those days. In that sense, broadcast paralleled its elite colleagues in print.
And I think most of that value system is gone. Foreign reporting is at the bottom of the agenda for the networks today. All three have closed bureau after bureau. Those foreign correspondents who still exist have a hard time getting on the air.
Christiane Amanpour is the only television journalist of note in the last decade who has made a name by covering foreign assignments, and she did it, of course, for the new upstart network, CNN. Only then did CBS decide it might be interested in her for one of its star vehicle magazine shows.
What I think is happening is something extremely serious, nothing less than a change in the value system in a very important part of the news business.
At the core of the old value system was a belief on the part of the men and women who worked in journalism that this was an uncommonly privileged life, that we did not do this for the money -- almost all of us could have made a great deal more money in some other field, but we were uncommonly privileged, free men and free women working for a free press in a free society, beneficiaries of exalted constitutional freedoms, willing, if need be on occasion, to report to the nation things which it did not necessarily want to hear.
More, we knew we had inherited those special freedoms, which were hard won by those who went before us; we were accepting nothing less than a sacred trust and in accepting this trust, we owed something back.
What was marvelous about that era -- and is still marvelous about those remaining journalistic companies with family ownership, those rare places where journalism is produced by a kind of blood capitalism, and family tradition, and a sense of familial obligation -- is that we who worked in the field felt that the ownership shared our values, and respected our risks and sacrifices.
What has changed is not the talent and idealism and passion of the journalists out there, but the value system which governs the way they work, and finally what gets in the paper or on the air.
Until recently, those values were shared by that generation's television reporters, and we thought of them as peers, most notably men like Walter Cronkite and Jack Chancellor, and all kinds of gifted men and women who worked for them, and whose values were the same as ours.
In that era, there was a simple formula, print defined, broadcast amplified; that meant that the front page of the Times and the Post set the agenda for the networks, and it meant that we -- print and broadcast -- thought we were in the same business.
I am not so sure many print reporters feel that about their broadcast colleagues today -- that they are colleagues. Anymore I think we see most of the more celebrated television people as television personalities rather than journalists.
A number of things stand out in the change of values which has come about in the last decade or so. Because of its growing power and influence and because of the ever-greater competition, not just network against network, but network against cable show, the television executive producers have redefined what constitutes news -- often going for stories that television likes to cover, stories which are telegenic, because they have action or are sexy or are tabloid- or scandal-driven.
We have morphed in the larger culture from a somewhat Calvinist society to an entertainment society, and that is reflected in the new norms of television journalism -- where the greatest sin is not to be wrong but to be boring. Because boring means low ratings. And so altogether too many people at the top in the television newsrooms have accepted the new, frillier dictates of the men and women above them in the corporations.
And somewhere in there we have lost the classic definition of a great editor. A great editor in the old days was someone who balanced what people wanted to know with what they needed to know. And in network television, other than "Nightline" and a handful of other comparable shows, that definition is gone.
Let me add a corollary to that. Some of these changes had been coming for a long time as television producers became more comfortable with their own values and less dependent upon what they considered the restrictive (and to them boring) values of an earlier generation who based their news values on print and more often than not came from print.
But the quantum change had come with the coming of cable, and the fierce new competition generated by cable news shows, which were primarily about sex, scandal and celebrity. Or celebrity, sex and scandal. Soon, we began to see a willingness on the part of the networks -- their own audience fragmenting, their ratings down -- to embrace, particularly in their magazines, these tabloid values as their own.
Magazines which were essentially tabloid were inexpensive to produce, more so than sitcoms, seemed to have acceptable ratings, and so they proliferated under the guise of being news. And a great many of our colleagues went along with it -- for immense salaries and a great deal of air time, of course.
There was an important development in the economic structure of the networks taking place at the same time. For at exactly the same time, the networks were making a transition from the end of the proprietorial generation to the coming of the managerial generation. The large communications companies began to go public, were listed on the big board and were found, at a time when traditional blue chip stocks like Ford, GM and U.S. Steel were undergoing intense international competition, to be undervalued stocks.
Suddenly, these were hot stocks with a great deal of pressure on them. That change in ownership is a critical one. The older generation -- whatever its flaws, and they were not inconsiderable -- felt a sense of obligation and responsibility, not just to the people who worked in their newsrooms -- and a respect for what they did, but a larger responsibility to their customers, the people who bought their newspapers and listened to and watched their networks and their news programs. And that sense of personal responsibility for what they put on, is I think largely gone.
That proprietorial generation has been replaced by a managerial generation with no roots in our business, with a short-range view of the good of the company, and for whom the only index which matters is the price of the stock, and a belief, never openly expressed, of course, that the real customers are not the people who buy the paper or listen at night, but the people who buy the stock.
And that frees them from all other responsibilities. As long as the stock does well, they are presumed to have met their real responsibilities. There is no larger obligation. So a crucial link in the family of journalism has been cut -- from the owners to the people who work for them, and the people who should be their customers.
It was probably cut anyway because every time the corporation got bigger, there were more and more walls between the newsroom and the heads of the corporation. In all of this, the heads of the networks are separated from the more serious obligations, which, I think have historically gone with these precious freedoms.
I think a lot of the returns are in, and a decade after the values began to change, I think we know that we have an ever-escalating diet of sensationalized tabloid reporting and an endless, unquestioning search for access to celebrities on their own terms, and an escalating coverage of high-profile crimes.
Somewhere in there, gradually, but systematically, there has been an abdication of responsibility within the profession, most particularly in the networks.
Television's gatekeepers, at a time when a fragmenting audience threatens the singular profits of the past, stopped being gatekeepers and began to look the other way on moral and ethical and journalistic issues. Less and less did they accept the old-fashioned charge for what they owed the country.
Talk shows, allegedly public affairs-oriented, desperate for even the smallest share of a fractured market, have become ever more confrontational and meaner-spirited -- anxious, it would seem, to shed heat instead of light.
You get in the green room and the assistant producer comes over and tells you that Bob or Jim or Ed or Bill, whoever the host is, really likes it when you get in there and mix it up -- the more insulting you can be toward the other party on the show, the better. It makes for what is called good television. And serious issues go uncovered or undercovered.
No issue tore this country apart more than whether we should make some kind of military commitment to those victims of genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo, but does anyone really believe that in the critical years before the president's decision to bomb, the networks, and most of the print press, did an adequate job of explaining to the American people what was at stake?
The viewpoint seemed to be -- from their testing and polling -- that the American people did not want to know what was going on, so why bother them with unwanted facts too soon? So, if we look at the media today, we ought to be aware not just of what we are getting, but what we are not getting; the difference between what is authentic and what is inauthentic in contemporary American life and in the world, with a warning that in this celebrity culture, the forces of the inauthentic are becoming more powerful all the time.